Road trips before GPS and maps apps. Navigating off just paper maps and poor signage was not fun.
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I don't want to change back, but I still thought it added a sense of adventure, and having to be actively involved with the navigation gave you more awareness of where you were and where you were going. Now you just slavishly follow instructions and then some hours later you are there.
Like, we drove to Austria last summer and when we came back my dad asked me: so did you drive over Stuttgart or Nuremberg? And I honestly didn't know.
Riding motorcycles is a way back to this sense of adventure. You sort out your path before riding, do your best to remember as much as you can, and then do your best while on the road for as long as you can. Pulling out a phone is a pain while riding, so you want to go as far as you can and happily improvise to see how well you can do.
You quickly get to the point where you learn to remember route numbers and such and can go pretty far on memory and educated guesses. Feels cool, and you start to learn an area well, getting to the point where you can give people quite detailed directions.
Its a shame because it is something I am actually really good at, and now it's a completely useless skill!
I originally read this as "what are you nostalgic about" and was confused by all the responses.
I am certainly not nostalgic about smoking sections in restaurants. Those half ass dividers that did nothing and the whole place smelling like an ash tray was not fun.
Phone calls in general. I've always been a computer nerd that prefers thinking about my responses and typing them out in front of a glowing rectangle.
God, I love my glowing rectangles 🥰
Working in an office. I get so much more done at home. With no sickness from selfish people who won't mask when sick. Plus I can walk my dog multiple times a day. And cook real food.
I wish I could not work in an office
Listening to the radio
Limited selection, constant ads, and hit or miss sound quality. Digital music and podcasts are better in every way. The only thing I really miss is discovering new music on a local college radio station.
Great, reading this while listening to the radio, huge stereo wall, Onkio tuner, FM antenna in the attic, coax cable trough the house,... I have a constant quality and yes, internet radio is a tad better, but the biggest issue there is the delay. When you have radio in multiple rooms, the different delays are a use sourec of irritation. Also my wife finds the sount to harsh witn sattelite radio or DAB.
As long as FM is available, I'll use it for radio. When it's end of the road for FM, I'll switch to my own collection. (And in the car, no alternative to FM, CD of cassette)
I still listen to the radio in my car even though I have Bluetooth. My car is an older model and there are times when it will stop auto connecting and I'll have to connect it again. So, I'd rather just listen to the radio
I personally prefer silence over radio.
Pop up ads. They were a plague in the early internet day.
Myspace. There were so many poorly designed Myspace pages that were hard to read and would make it take longer to load the website.
Cassette tapes. I like discs, but tapes... Damn that belongs in a museum. Even tho I do admire the technology.
(Unless for like, storage backup and stuff where it can be actually useful.)
You remember portable CD players before they had a buffer cache? Couldn't even keep them in your pocket without skipping like mad.
I don't, but I'm aware of that (same in cars). I only got into CDs near the end of their popularity, maybe that's the main reason I'm sick of tapes and like discs. (Altho frankly, any portable/headphone audio was shit compared to what we have today.)
The thing that blows my mind about tape is that copying 1:1 is real time and takes the exact same time as the track is long. Or that making a copy always lowers quality with every generation. Analogue media is whack, man.
I still love CDs, but don't miss vinyl records at all. I grew up in the original vinyl era and was very happy to no longer have to bother with a big and unwieldy format which is physically degraded during every play and which you have to tiptoe past the player to avoid making it skip.
Smokers and smoking. It was glorified in the 80s and 90s. You were seen as cool and manly. Such a bad habit.
It was glorified then, before that is what normalized which it much worse.
Gas lawn mowers. I hated reeking of exhaust fumes as a kid.
Almost everyone I see mowing is still using gas. Not sure that's out of style/can be considered something that people could have nostalgia for.
VHS tapes. The freed space moving to DVD and Blu-ray was most welcome.
Agreeing with that. Man, remember having to rewind the thing when you were done so the next watch was ready? Or realizing that it wasn't rewound when you wanted to watch it and having to do it yourself?
Or thinking that you were about to watch a certain movie but someone taped over top of it? Good times...
I was just thinking about dial up last night while downloading a game update. My wifi was downloading like 1GB/min and I sat there absolutely amazed at how fast that was, thinking about how the younger me would’ve been mind-blown with that speed.
I don’t miss not knowing things. If I am unsure of something today I can pull out my phone and Google it. Although I do wish I had more of a reason to go to the library now
Younger me would have been kind blown about a 500mb hard drive.
That too! Imagine taking a 256 GB micro SD card to the past?
Incandescent bulbs, i hate them with every fiber of my being.
Why is that? The light they give off is generally pleasing.
They were very expensive to run and had to be constantly changed. As a kid we always had a drawer of replacement bulbs ready. I don't bother any more they last so long.
Led bulbs give off very pleasant light these days if you get the right colour temperature.
They usually don't last more than 4 months, they waste a lot of electricity and they are too hot compared to LEDs.
CRTs in TVs and monitors. Heavy bastards with small DPI.
Yeah but they were particle accelerators that shot electrons towards your face at relativistic speeds (the phosphor grid and lead lining made use more pleasurable). That's just too damn cool.
The time before phones and especially smartphones.
Being able to call anyone you want is huge. And being able to look up information on the go is even better.
Yeah, you used to call a location. Now you call the person. It's so much nicer.
God I used to hate phoning girls houses and their parents answered. Especially the first time after you just got their number.
Misread the title with my first comment. Something I'm not particularly nostalgic about is school. I'm grateful for some of things that I learned, but my memories are not fond enough to want to repeat or relive any of it and I definitely wouldn't go to any sort of reunion. All of that is just way behind even it hasn't been a decade yet, I'm just over it with not much to reminiscence about.
Wow. I feel the same. For me school was always a place of competition. There was just studying and rarely did we get the time to play together with classmates. It was full of fucking idiot teachers who lacked basic humanity and would start beating you up if you failed to solve the questions they asked or make you kneel down for 40+ minutes on the floor. So yeah school was nothing to long for. Btw this was in India.
How different it was to exist as a girl in the 90s in the UK. I know that decade was better than many that had gone before it, but I look back at media from my childhood and it seems crazy to me now how normalised so much misogyny was. And although it didn't affect me directly, the same for anyone on the LQBTQ+ spectrum. Watching episodes of Friends makes me cringe.
90s-2000s approach to services. It was nearly impossible to cancel subscription services. Magazines, newspapers, cable TV, mobile and landline phones, etc.
Streaming services and online payment systems like PayPal forever changed consumer expectations on how to handle this kind of stuff, all for the better.
School, nuff said.